Second coming

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Micah P. Hinson was ditched by his devoutly religious
family, abandoned by his lover, and committed to a psych hospital -
all by the age of 24. But now he's back, and spreading the good
word. By Guy Blackman.

It is one of country music's central tenets that the best
songwriting is born of heartache, misery and strife. The stinging
poverty of Dolly Parton's five-to-a-bed childhood or the lifelong
depression that drove Hank Williams to morphine and liquor - this
is exactly the stuff that great country music is made of. So it was
that when a young Johnny Cash first auditioned for Sun Records in
1954, boss Sam Phillips told him to "go home and sin, then come
back with a song I can sell".

It's a belief that Texan singer-songwriter Micah P. Hinson may
have already taken to extremes. "Some people might just have one
bad relationship, and then they can understand," says the morose
country-noir musician, who tours Australia this month. "But I guess
other people like me have to take it a bit further than that, have
to do the whole drug addiction, jail, and bad women kind of
thing."

You might think that someone only 24 years old wouldn't have had
the time to fit in a destructive relationship, a prescription drug
habit, homelessness, bankruptcy, a spell in jail, and then enough
mental space to pull himself back from the brink and live to tell
the tale, but Hinson's story is as morbidly mesmerising as a train
wreck, and every bit of it is true.

"I was just about turning 19 when I first met her in college,"
he says of a woman whose name he refuses to mention throughout our
conversation, though we can reveal it as Melissa Berggren, a
one-time Vogue cover model and the widow of Wes Berggren,
guitarist for Texan band Tripping Daisy, who died of a drug
overdose in 1999. "Her husband had passed away, so she moved out
here to my hometown Abilene, because her parents had graduated from
here. And holy shit, I don't know if Australians have this, but
when kids in America grow up they'll have a hot teacher, or their
mom will have a friend, a Mrs Robinson kind of thing. Well, for me
it was like that.

"I was used as a kid to having to bust my balls to get any girl
to pay attention to me," he continues. "And all of a sudden this
gorgeous, seemingly amazing woman took me in her arms and we just
went away together. There was no trying, there was no bawling or
heartache. It was so easy."

Hinson was the skinny, awkward son of a psychology professor at
Abilene Christian University, where he met Berggren in 2000. He
lived at home, drove a car his parents had bought him, and
basically believed that whatever trouble he might get himself into,
his devoutly religious parents would be there to bail him out of.
But within a year, even they would be washing their hands of
him.

What had started so easily with Berggren quickly became
treacherous. Hinson discovered that his girlfriend had a taste for
prescription drugs, and before long the impressionable teenager had
one of his own. "Valiums, codeines, somas, anything in pill form
that we could get our hands on," he recalls. "Prescription drugs,
that was the dragon that f---in' burned our asses."

So began a downward spiral that would lead to him spending time
in county jail for forging prescriptions, being thrown out of
university, and eventually fleeing Abilene with Berggren to escape
bad debts and the ill will of their former friends.

"We went to a little town called Henrietta, and literally when
we first walked into the grocery store, we heard the music stop
over the loudspeakers, and everybody just turned and stared at us,"
Hinson says. "I had some delusions in my mind and ended up in a
mental institution for a week or so."

The couple slunk back into Abilene a few months later, and
Berggren got a job as a stripper. "After going through all that,
after all the money was gone, after all the credit cards were
spent, after my car had broken down and after we'd been kicked out
of our apartment, and I had no friends or family, she just decided
to leave me and moved in with her father-in-law, the father of the
guy that had passed on."

A shell-shocked Hinson bummed around from couch to couch,
spending a few nights sleeping under bridges, and finally had a
kind of epiphany when his ultra-conservative grandfather gave him
some money to rent a hotel room for a week.

More than just the money, it was the fact that someone was
willing to give him a break that helped Hinson give himself one.
"I'd actually been saved a bit," he says. "After all the bullshit,
after all the heartache and all the crap I'd caused people, here
was this hard-nosed Christian guy - who didn't even like women
wearing pants - who gave me money to save my life."

Hinson got himself a job in a call centre, was able to pay his
own rent the next week, and within two months was sufficiently
rehabilitated for his parents to let him move back into the family
home. "That hotel was definitely the lowest point and the highest
point of my life," he says. "I realised that just because I was in
trouble it didn't mean that someone was going to save my ass.
Because, basically, nobody was going to give a shit. I could easily
have just died and nobody would have really cared at that
point."

It's obvious that Hinson fundamentally blames Berggren for his
downfall, and he has been telling the story of her betrayal with
unmistakable rancour ever since his debut album Micah P. Hinson
and the Gospel Of Progress was released last year by small
English label Sketchbook records (it became a surprise critical
success in the UK). But he also realises that his words have been
twisted and taken out of context by the scandal-loving UK media,
which has taken to calling Berggren "the black widow".

"To be honest I really hope she doesn't read a lot of the press,
'cause the whole thing about her being the black widow, I didn't
say that," he protests. "This interview guy asked, 'Oh, so this
black widow woman blah blah', and in my answer I said, 'The black
widow', and now it's everywhere.

"She did do some very bad things to me, she was very selfish and
she was a total bitch at times, but you've got to cut her a bit of
slack. I mean, her husband of five years had just passed away. She
was a bad lady, but to be honest, I was a bad dude."

Hinson wrote his first song at age 13 and performed it at his
high school talent show, but really came into his own as a
songwriter in his late teens, when he began to record sporadically
with fellow Abilenians and members of up-and-coming classic pop
outfit the Earlies. Although the recordings were not released at
the time, Earlies singer John Mark Lapham made Hinson his own pet
project. Each time he sent out an Earlies demo to a record company,
he would include one of Hinson's. "That guy, if I had a Jesus, he
would be it, man," Hinson says of Lapham.

The Earlies eventually scored a transatlantic deal with 679
Recordings, a UK subisidiary of Warner, and their increased profile
in turn proved beneficial for Hinson. Playing a set of his
favourite songs on BBC Radio 2, Lapham included a Hinson track and
got a call from the impressed boss of Sketchbook Records.

The label wrote a cheque for Hinson's $US600 in unpaid traffic
fines and shipped him over to England to record The Gospel Of
Progress, with the Earlies as his backing band. As you might
expect, it's a dark, bitter album of songs written during Hinson's
12-month-long lost weekend. It sounds something like a country-ish
Leonard Cohen, though without the beauty of Cohen's pure poetry to
provide relief from the unremitting gloom.

"I think I finally began to learn how to live my life when the
record deal happened, and things started working out for me,"
Hinson says. "Which is pretty lucky because I don't think a lot of
people have their dreams come true after they've totally destroyed
their lives. I'd been such a cock, I wasn't a very good person at
all. I don't claim to be now, but I'm a lot better than I was."

Now with his life seemingly back together and a well-received
debut album under his belt, Hinson admits to worrying that he won't
have anything left to write about. "People might not think I'll be
able to write a record when my life's cleaned up, but I still cause
trouble," he says. "I still smoke too much grass, I take the
occasional LSD if I can find it, I drink myself into a stupor. I do
all those things. But I don't think you need to shoot yourself in
the foot or go rob a bank just so you can write a good song. There
are people out there that do write happy tunes - I mean Paul
McCartney, he's not a sad bastard and he's rich as shit!"

Micah P. Hinson plays the Northcote Social Club on
Thursday. Tel: 9486 1677